


Psychology of Developmental Maturity and (Probably) Imaginary Friends

by Palgrave (goldenrod)



Category: Community, Monsters Inc (2001)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-02
Updated: 2014-07-02
Packaged: 2018-02-07 03:54:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1884360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldenrod/pseuds/Palgrave
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Annie tries not to think much about her childhood friends.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Psychology of Developmental Maturity and (Probably) Imaginary Friends

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Five Women Boo Might Have Become](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12799) by [Merfilly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merfilly/pseuds/Merfilly). 



> Any feedback and kudos you might wish to leave are welcome and gratefully received. Enjoy!

Annie tries not to think much about her childhood friends.

Like her mother always said (with barely suppressed frustration), monsters aren’t real, they certainly don’t live behind closet doors, and focussing on them was hardly going help with her grade-point average. It was fine when you were a little girl, Annie, but time to grow up, time to stop making up those stories about your imaginary friends. You can’t get to a good college through the doors of a bedroom closet, after all.

But still, they lurk there in the back of her mind and the corner of her eye late at night during another epic study marathon, big and cuddly and blue and small and round and green. And they always look so sad every time she takes another handful of pills to help her focus. And sometimes she thinks they try to talk to her and try to tell her to stop, but she doesn’t hear them and she wouldn’t listen if she could. Part of her wants to, but deep down Annie knows that they’re just figments of a lonely little girl’s imagination and the medication swirling inside her system. And even if they weren’t, they wouldn’t understand that she _needs_ this, that the magical, wonderful adventures they had when she was a little girl aren’t good enough any more (and maybe they should be, but for some reason they aren’t, and that’s just the way it goes). That she needs to win, to reach the top, to show the world that’s she’s perfect on the outside so that maybe she can start to feel that way on the inside as well.

She doesn’t see her childhood friends the day she finally comes apart, the day the drugs finally take her over. But in her distorted, overdosing vision, everyone starts shifting into robots with the sickly elegance of a previously invisible chameleon finally revealing it’s true colours, and as the world reaches out to her to suck the life out of her with the twisted mechanical coils of a long-forgotten childhood nightmare, it feels like all she can do is scream.

(As it happens, she can also run through a plate glass window. Which, it has to be said, is not much of an improvement.)

Time passes, and Annie finds herself in a school that is the last place where she wanted to be. It’s a weird place full of oddballs and freaks and weirdos and people with unusual hair. Things don’t make sense, the rules she’s used to don’t apply here, and it smells kind of funny as well. But the funny thing is, the longer she spends there the more she finds she’s surprisingly well-prepared for it. Because it’s also full of people who love her for who she is no matter how strange or broken or weird they think she is, because when it comes down to it they’re just as weird. 

And more than once, as she sits around a study room table with friends who have become more of a family to her than her actual family, she swears she sees her childhood friends out of the corner of her eye. And that after so long they’re finally smiling at her again. 

 

 


End file.
